OK, not really. Pigs might fly before JH Prynne, whose work comes with a notorious reputation for obscurity and who is famously shy of giving interviews or reading in public, would either be up for, or any good at, being poet laureate.

But my point is to suggest – on the day that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport begins the search for Andrew Motion's successor – how narrow the available pool of contenders actually is.

For a start, there aren't actually that many brilliant poets lurking about. There are even fewer, I suspect, who would admit to being monarchists. (And you just can't get away from the fact that you're likely going to have to write a poem when the Queen dies, or on the occasion of Prince William's marriage, unless the element of court scribbler is removed from the post, as arguably it should be.)

There are a yet tinier number who would be brave enough to submit their lives to the kind of scrutiny and tabloid prurience that has been Andrew Motion's lot over the past decade. (We might note that the position of Master of the Queen's Music, occupied by Peter Maxwell Davies, has been quieter – but then Max lives on the island of Sanday, well out of the way of most hacks.)

Then there is the fact that there has never been a woman laureate, leave alone a black or Asian laureate, so it is possible that middle-aged white men will be lower down the list of candidates than they were in Tennyson or Hughes's day.

Which leaves Carol Ann Duffy. Frankly, for me her "notorious" poem on knife crime rules her in, rather than out. But who would you like to see in the post?